My Journey Into Architecture

Today’s Topics:

• How did my interest start?
• Architecture as a hobby
• Taking classes in high school

How did my interest start?

My interest in architecture began when my parents helped design the house that I grew up in. We were moving into a cookie cutter neighborhood where all of the houses looked quiet similar, but luckily my parents bought the house early enough to make some changes to more personalize the house.

The main changes in the house were in the basement. We had an office/music room, then there was a recreational room made for playing games and such, a full bathroom, lastly, we had a custom theater room fit for our specific couch and with a wall cutout to fit our big screen TV (this was back when TV’s were not flat screens) with a room behind it for cable management and movie storage.

Architecture as a hobby

Growing up I was really intrigued by what all they had done and by the time I was in middle school, I had started creating floor plans (what I thought they would be like) of what I would want my home to look like or what I would want it to be like in the future.

I have a notebook with various different floor plans. My drawings were all based off of what I would remember from where I have lived or what I would imagine living in.

I used graph paper because I felt that it was the closest I could get to an authentic floor plan based on what I knew at the time. Each box would be equal to 1 square foot. I also had to plan out the spaces accordingly to make sure there was adequate spacing between each room to fit objects into them.

This drawing was of the apartment I lived in at the time. I was amazed by the efficiency of the space because it served all of our needs in a similar way that a 3 story house would.

Taking classes in high school

Up until high school, my only art experience was just the required art classes that students take in grade school.

At this point I thought that art was a pretty cool concept and I took it seriously, but it was not anything that I would go out of my way to do on my own. In my opinion I was pretty skilled at art but I was not amazing at what I did.

Architecture was always in the back of my head as a career that I would want to pursue, but it was only in high school when I fully started to prepare for it. I started off by planning out my schedule for my 4 years of high school where I could complete my prerequisites in the first 2 years, to have the ability to take classes that focused on architecture in my last 2 years.

The prerequisites were the basic art classes where I got to learn general art concepts which in some cases were good enough to be displayed in the hallway. I learned about colors and the way that they can mix with each other to form different colors. We were also taught how to give art an appearance of having texture with different types of strokes. Then my favorite was learning about 1, 2, and 3 point perspective because we got to draw a tree house.

Junior, and Senior year, I finally got to move to the exciting things in which I was most interested in. I pursued architecture through a couple of different classes. Honors Applied Design, Graphic Imaging and Design, and Independent Study. Most of the things that I know about architecture came from these classes.

These classes setup the framework by teaching me the basic concepts so that I could find my interests and further indulge into it. We learned about how the industry is heading into an era where sustainable design will be very important and the materials that would accommodate this growth. This class had enhanced concepts that I learned in the past like combining two-point perspective drawings with water color painting.

Learning the Adobe suite with Illustrator, Photoshop, and In-design was a semester long focus. We completed various small projects to learn the different tools, and took notes on visual interpretation. As a final for Graphic Imaging and Design we made an image of an object and to be submitted into a school-wide competition in which I won 3rd place.

We also were given the basic knowledge about google sketch-up and model-making to create our own projects as a final presentation. Completing this was a semester long project and I completely fell in love with architecture the my design process.

All of the tours of architecture schools that I went on would always say that it is going to be hard changing to a style where you are required to spend so much time working, but I came to realize that I naturally have the passion to spend so much time on my projects. Not only would I spend my full class times working on my project, I also came after school most days to spend an hour or two working on it. I was obsessed with completing high quality work.

This is the final model that my partner and I ended up making throughout the semester. Spending so much time on making this project great has earned it a display case where it still sits within the school building

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Thank you for reading this week’s blog post, make sure to watch my video portfolio, you can also subscribe down below! Stay tuned to find out how you can make accurate floor plans of your own house next week even if you do not study architecture! As always,

Dream Big!